Pizza Fusion: Organic Pizza Comes to Town

A new post this morning on Houstonist about the first and only certified organic restaurant in Houston, which will be opening in November: Pizza Fusion.

Green Pizza Comes to Houston

Located up north at Highway 249 and Louetta, Pizza Fusion will feature not only a totally organic menu and an extremely environmentally-conscious building, but a glut of gluten-free, lactose-free, vegetarian and vegan items on their menu.  They even have organic wine and gluten-free beer.  How freaking cool is that?

A side shout-out:  Cory, between the location and the menu, it’s like this restaurant was specially created for you and your wife.

When Pizza Fusion opens next month, you can be sure I’ll be one of their first customers — even if it means driving into the great unknown of north Houston. 

The Ultimate Blog Awards

Alright, food bloggers.  If you think you’re up to snuff (and want to part with $100 of your hard-earned money), you now have the opportunity to nominate yourself for a James Beard Award.

You read correctly.  A James Beard Award.

For the first time ever, the ultra-prestigious James Beard Foundation — which awards yearly prizes in categories like best chef, best restauranteur, best wine service, best cookbook author and best food journalist — will have an award for Best Blog.

No, seriously:

The Journalism Awards program has established a new James Beard Foundation Award for Blogs focusing on Food, Restaurants, Beverage, or Nutrition. Blogs have become an essential part of today’s evolving media landscape. They provide journalists from both traditional and nontraditional backgrounds with an immediate, direct outlet for their work, and open up an unprecedented avenue for vibrant dialogue with readers. With the addition of this vital new category, the James Beard Foundation recognizes the tremendous impact that blogs have had on food journalism, and their importance to the future of the medium.

There is no cash prize that comes along with any of the awards, merely the prestige of having won what’s popularly referred to as the “Oscar of the food world.”

The Best Blog award falls under the journalism category, which means that at least a few people out there in the world recognize blogging as something more than merely a social media tool, but as a legitimate means of conveying news and information.

Then again, the JBF folks could just want another category that will garner them $100 per entry.  Your call…

Tuesday Trivia: Thursday Edition

Your patience with our much-delayed Tuesday Trivia will be rewarded this week with a shiny new prize! What is that prize? Find out after trivia…

1. Medieval writers and religious figures took a very broad view on gluttony, arguing that the sin encompassed more than simply over-indulgence in food and beverage. Thomas Aquinas went so far as to prepare a list of six additional ways one could commit gluttony while consuming a meal. What were three of these ways?
2. Gluttony isn’t the only deadly sin that relates to food. Avarice, or greed, is responsible for driving up the cost of food items worldwide as investors and commodities traders profit from the abject poverty and hunger in countries like the Phillipines, Honduras and Bangladesh. Since 2000, the worldwide price of various oils and fats has risen by 300%, the price of milk by over 150%. By how much has the price of grains gone up since 2000?
3. People have historically used food as one of many displays of wealth and pride, and still do to this day. Caviar is generally accepted as one of the food items most easily associated with a prideful life. What is the highest grade of Russian caviar on the market? Hint: its name is derived from the Russian word for “little salt.”
4. Throughout history, people have sought aphrodesiacs to increase their own virility or induce lust in the object of their affections. Which of these foods is not traditionally considered an aphrodesiac: balut, arugula, ginseng, kelp or abalone?
5. People go to war for many things: religion, land, natural resources. Food (and famine) has been one of the main causes of wrath and wars throughout human history. In fact, most anthropologists now believe that the population of what mysterious island was wiped out after a civil war over food (or, rather, a lack thereof)?
6. BONUS: Sloth has created a nation (and a world) obsessed with fat-and-calorie-laden fast food and pre-packaged meals. What creation has been widely dubbed the “worst fast food burger” in America, nutritionally-speaking?

Now, obviously, the theme this week was…the Seven Deadly Sins. And the reason for that is two-fold. The first reason is that this week’s prize is one of my all-time favorite food anthropology books, In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food.

Today’s trivia winner will receive a copy of this truly fascinating book, shipped directly to their front door. I promise that none of today’s questions come from the book, either, so you’re guaranteed a fresh, interesting, eye-opening look at food taboos and food history as it relates to the Western concept of the Seven Deadly Sins.

The second reason is that Randy Rucker will be holding his highly-anticipated Seven Deadly Sins dinner this Monday, October 20th, at Culinaire Catering on Milam. The menu for the night includes seven courses, one for each sin. You don’t want to miss this special tenacity dinner. As always, you can email Randy at rrucker79 at hotmail dot com to RSVP for the dinner. Do it soon! Spots are filling up fast for this one.

Answers (and this week’s winner! — I’m very excited about this!!!) will be announced tomorrow afternoon, so hurry up and get those guesses in before anyone else comes in to crib off you! See you all back here on Friday, bluebirds!

Pre-Trivia Poll: Input, Please!

Since this will be our first ever Tuesday (er…Thursday) Trivia contest with an actual prize, I’d like to get your input on the fairest way to choose the winner for said prize.

Since we will occasionally have two or more people with the highest score (or with all the answers correct!), take a look at the poll below and let me know what you think is the fairest means for selecting a winner.

The poll will close at noon and Tuesday Trivia will be on!

UPDATE: The poll hath spoken.  If more than one person has all the correct answers (or ties for the most correct answers), the winner will be chosen at random from that group.  I will write the names on a piece of paper and my dog, Niblet, will do the honors of sniffing/eating/peeing on/choosing the winner.

Like Jesus to a Child

Trying to explain my undying love of pork, pork products and all things pork to a coworker this afternoon:

Me:  Me and pork are like…  Are like…  Are like……..

Mike:  Like what?

Me:  Like…you know.  I LOVE pork.

Mike:  You’re terrible at analogies.

Me:  Look, I’m just trying to think of a love that is reciprocal and doesn’t end in tragedy.  No Romeo and Juliet-type stuff.

Mike:  Like Windex and glass?

Me:  YOU’RE TERRIBLE AT ANALOGIES.

Mike:  Whatever.

Me:  Like Bobby and Whitney.  Oh, wait…no.

Mike:  Like Ike and Tina?

Me:  No!  No beatings or crack!  Like Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

Mike:  They broke up.

Me:  Oh.  Then, like Brad and Angelina.

Mike:  TOO NEW.

Me:  OKAY, FINE.  Like Danny Devito and Rhea Perlman.

Mike:  What?!?

Me:  Odd, but eternal.  Yes.  That’s how pork and I feel about each other.

Next time, I’ll stick to letting George Michael write the bizarre analogies and just go eat some bacon.

Tuesday Trivia: Part Postponed

Tuesday Trivia will have to be postponed to Wednesday, which would make it something like Wednesday Quizday (and which is, honestly, pretty lame) but that’s the way the cookie crumbles today.  Work.  Busy.  Grunt.

In the meantime, a rare glimpse of she eats. herself:

I HAZ A HAIRCUT

That is all.

The Wrath of Pedialyte

I was incredibly weak yesterday afternoon, either from dehydration or lack of sleep, but I decided that I could try and remedy at least one of the potential causes by going to the drugstore for some Pedialyte.

Inside of Walgreen’s, I stood blearily eyeing the different bottles that lined the shelves, just above the infant formula.  So this is what I’ve been reduced to…

I couldn’t decide on a “flavor” of Pedialyte to buy; the system the manufacturers used for choosing flavors for this stuff seemed laughably arbitrary: grape, unflavored, bubble gum, mango and the ominously-named “artificial fruit flavored.”  None of these appealed to me.  In fact, the thought of “bubble gum” Pedialyte made me want to vomit right there in the aisle, and I was beyond certain that the “unflavored” bottle wasn’t truly going to be “unflavored.”  Also, on a side note, what two-year-old wants mango-flavored Pedialyte?

After finally settling on a four-pack of single-serve portions in apple (also available in cherry!), I dragged my haul home and twisted the lid off a room-temperature apple-flavored Pedialyte, ready to become rehydrated.

If you have kids, then you’ve bought Pedialyte at some point.  However, I doubt that you’ve actually tasted the stuff.  Let me break it down for you: DON’T.  It tastes like candy-coated death.

The second that stuff hit my mouth and tongue, I wanted to cry.  I have never tasted anything so foul and noxious in my entire life.  It is so intensely sweet that the only thing I could compare it to is dissolving 90 packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low into a bowl of “apple-flavored” syrup and then drinking it.  I struggled to swallow it, and as it trickled down my throat it felt like sugary lava.  The stuff is so sweet it burns.  My jaw ached, my throat ached, my eyes watered.

I once had to drink an entire Route 44-sized container of barium for an upper GI scan.  It was brutally thick, concentrated and chalky: like someone had dissolved an entire box of chalk into a pan of water and then stirred in some cornstarch.  But even that was more tolerable than drinking one eight-ounce super-sugary-apple Pedialyte.  I felt like this must be what the Devil gives you to drink in Hell.  But I was determined to drink it.

After several attempts at drinking it straight up, I eventually discovered that it tastes much more palatable over ice, especially when the ice has completely melted into it.  That way, you can chug it all down at once, with your nose pinched.  Watering the stuff down definitely takes away the burn, but not the rancid, metallic taste.  I’m presuming the reason it’s so sugary is an ill-advised attempt to mask that coppery taste.  The solution?  A ginger ale chaser.

So I chugged a watered-down Pedialyte last night and one more this morning and — I’ve got to be honest — I feel like a million bucks today.  I’m still making the regularly-scheduled potty breaks every half-hour, but the stomach cramps are completely gone and I feel completely rejuvenated, despite the fact that I didn’t get more than a couple hours of sleep last night.

Moral of the story:  Pedialyte tastes so spectacularly awful that it will make you want to spontaneously burst into tears and claw out your own throat, but it does a body good.